


Homeward Bound

by SingleWhiteCatLady



Series: Plotgrenades [3]
Category: Mad Max Fury road, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Can be read as either platonic soul mates, F/M, Gen, Good People of AO3 Cat-Lady can FLUFF!., Happy Ending, Max Comes Back, or prelude to slash, shameless fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-27 00:14:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6261469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SingleWhiteCatLady/pseuds/SingleWhiteCatLady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max gets curious, and as they say, curiosity killed the cat. This however, ends much better than he had anticipated.</p><p>0-0-0<br/>PLOTGRENADE on Tumblr; Max in the gardens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homeward Bound

0-0-0

 

He remembers seeing them as he was fleeing from War Boys. A brief moment of shock as he’d shoved open that last set of doors and come to a stop barely an inch from plummeting to his death. He’d looked up and—Green. So much green. More than he’d seen in lifetimes.

 

He hadn’t let himself think of them during the Run, or after as he’d slipped away through the throng of people on the desert floor.

 

Three months later he’d swung back, skirting close—and lost his tires to a caltrop buried in the sand.

 

Shredded them… Of course.

 

He was lucky he’d been going at a relatively slow speed or when the bike skidded out he would have been terribly hurt, or possibly killed. Scrapes and bruises and injured pride were bad enough. He didn’t know if it was an intentional trap, or if it had just been bad luck and coincidence. But there was no way he was going to make it far on a bike with no tires.

 

He muttered to himself, and the specters at the edges of his vision and tried to get the bike up… but there was no roar of engines, no bullets taking chunks from his flesh.

 

He hid himself behind a dune and trained his spyglass on the Citadel… Found little squat structures built around the bases of the towers, long banners of green and white hanging from various points on the three larger buttes. That grinning skull had been chipped away, carved into a downward tilted hand, with a single thin cascade of water flowing from the fingertips.

 

He worked his tongue at the backs of his teeth. Curiously scanned the area. What luck would he have of sneaking in and taking a couple tires… maybe some fresh supplies?

 

A nagging little voice in the back of his head asked where he was going, stay, please stay.

 

He bared his teeth at it, drummed his fingers, picked up the bike and started pushing it along.

 

He walked for about an hour and a half before it seemed the Citadel’s lookouts spotted him.

 

A single car appeared, speeding his way trailing a cloud of dust.

 

Max kept his head down and a hand on his weapon, pretended his arm was injured and played up his limp, hoping to appear harmless, easily overlooked or underestimated.

 

There was a young man in the car with a short mop of curly dark hair above a sunburned face. There was young boy in the passenger seat wielding a large semi-automatic. They both had green palmprints on their chests.

 

Max eyed them, felt his heart beating quickly.

 

The older boy looked him up and down, lifted his chin—“Need some help?”

 

He blinked.

 

Blinked again.

 

The older boy popped open the car door and hefted himself out, reached back in for a crutch and hobbled over. He was missing his right leg from the hip down, smiled brightly and held out a canteen.

 

Max took it slowly, drank greedily once he’d sniffed the contents; “What is this place?”

 

“Haven… Once Citadel,” The one legged boy said. “Do you need some help?”

 

Max eyed the little boy with the gun still trained on him; “Do I have a choice?”

 

The one legged boy turned and glanced at his passenger; “Boogie’s only making sure you’re not gonna hurt us.”

 

Max shook his head and lowered his hand from his weapon. The little boy did the same. The elder smiled widely, “Let’s get your bike in the back and we’ll take you in.”

 

Max rides in the back of the car with his bike, tolerates the bumps and speed and grips tightly to any handhold he can find.

 

There’s a woman waiting for him. She’s generously plump with long black hair and dark skin, wears a brown skirt and pale top. A throng of small children follow her everywhere. She smiles and guides Max and his bike to the lifts, chats sweetly as it rises; “Don’t worry, they’ll have it fixed up in no time!”

 

“What’s the cost?”

 

The woman looks at him, then at the bike; “We’ll have to see.”

 

Max doesn’t like the ambigiousness of the answer. Keeps his ‘injured’ arm close to his body—hand close to his gun.

 

There’s a familiar face waiting at the top of the lift. She grins crookedly; “Fancy seeing you again!”

 

Toast’s let her hair grow, has it pulled back into small braids with little beads, a long feather hangs behind her right ear and she has small black dots along the arches of each eyebrow. She looks at the bike with an air of disdain; “Tires is all?”

 

He grunts, feels strangely exposed under the weight of her stare.

 

“Too bad… It’ll only take about an hour—“ Her grin broadens, darkens in something like glee. “Take him up to the Council, I’m sure they’d love to see him again.”

 

Max contemplates running—even if he’d wind up launching himself to his death of the edge of the lift.

 

The children crowded around the large woman behind him take hold of his clothes and start tugging.

 

He has to physically restrain himself from fighting them off—Breathes deep and slow and makes himself follow their urging. They eventually let him go and run ahead, a guide instead of a force.

 

Up-up-up a staircase bolted to the wall, in through a narrow passage in the living rock. UpUPUP! A steep incline, through a passage with many small windows cut into the rocks letting in light from outside—he can see tiny green shoots and plants through the holes, on small ledges—

 

Daylight ahead and suddenly he’s on top of the garage tower standing amid a copse of fruit trees.

 

He stumbles back, stunned—frightened, but a voice catches his attention.

 

“Max?”

 

His head whips to the side and he spots them. A large group of men and women all turned from where they were sitting around a stone table in the shade of a thick cloth awning.

 

Max sees a few more plump women, a few men with scars shaped like flames and skulls, pink against their skin. He sees Dag leaned back in her seat fiddling with a bit of string holding her trousers closed over the small bowl of her stomach.

 

Cheedo and Capable are at her side, the former with her hair pulled back by a colorful band. He sees the Vuvalini women on their feet, mid-sentence, and then he spots Furiosa, sitting off to the side with two more men. She’s on her way to standing, eyes wide and surprised… She looks healthier, skin kissed by the sun, a small smile on her face.

 

She’s wearing a new prosthetic. It’s smaller than the last, with only three fingers and fewer wires. She stops an arm’s length from him, chin tilted up, lids lowered—mouth curved up in a way that is both superior and grateful; “You look awful.”

 

Max peered down at himself, selfconscious in a way he couldn’t remember being before. He looked up again—couldn’t meet her eyes, and scratched at the hair growing on his cheek.

 

She tilted her head to the right, “Come on.”

 

He followed, felt caught in her gravity, watched the fabric of her top shift with the movement of her body.

 

Capable waved as he passed and he nodded in acknowledgement, followed the path farther along the side of the garden.

 

Furiosa stopped and plucked a round reddened fruit from a basket sitting by the path, called; “Hey,” and tossed it his way.

 

He almost batted it to the side, afraid it might explode—But caught it turned it over in his hands with his mouth flooding in excitement.

 

Peaches.

 

A firm, fuzzy, pink and gold PEACH!

 

He watched as Furiosa plucked up one for herself, used her mechanical thumb as a sort of peeler and scraped back the tough furry flesh, bit into the tender inner bits and swiped a bit of juice from her chin.

 

His hands shook as he rubbed the tender skin back with the edge of his thumbnail, peeled it up in strips and dropped it to the ground as she did. He ate it down to the pit and exchanged it to her for a different fruit. A small orange—or tangerine, he couldn’t truthfully remember the difference. The seeds went into a pouch on her belt, the skins into a heap of clippings and waste.

 

She seemed to be giving him a silent tour, pausing to let him stare up in shock at trees or down at plants, or to share their crop.

 

He ate everything she handed him, ignored the way she grinned and chuckled. Let himself be lead to a secluded spot in the shade of a boulder and sat on the grass, threaded his fingers carefully through the soft green shoots and almost wept at all the tender greenness around him. The rows of bean plants, trees of fruit and nuts—The buzzing of bees in carefully kept boxes.

 

Bees. Trees. Fruit—

 

“Are you OK?” Furiosa was sitting at his side now, metal arm propped across her knee. She looked at him, long and hard—as if trying to read the shift and tick of his facial features.

 

He nodded, throat thick—nodded again and cleared his throat. It had been a long time since he’d seen something flourishing. And this place—Haven, once Citadel—seemed to be doing just that. No longer stifled under the Immortan’s weight, this place was free and thriving and he feared he may poison it with his presence. Like a cancer or a contagion—

 

“I never thanked you,” She said evenly, not looking at him. “For making sure they got home. For everything.”

 

He swallowed a lump in his throat; “I—” He swallowed gestured at the trees and the rocks and the plants with a misty look in his eyes; “You did this, not me… I didn’t do anything.”

 

“Yes you did,” She sighed, turned and reached out to brush her hand against his fingers, curled through the grass as they were. “You made sure I got to see it.”

 

He looked up again, met her gaze and felt the tension in his shoulders relax. He sighed, tilted his head back against the rock and tightened his hand in hers.

 

0-0-0


End file.
